when I see that whichever instance I choose is defederated from another bunch of random instances, is it possible to have those show in my feed without making a separate profile from other instances? and can I turn them off again if I see that defederating was the right idea?
Yes, but It’s pretty hands off since 99% of security stuff is managed for you by the Lemmy software, including rate limiting. Just make sure you use a secure password and if you want put the instance behind cloudflare which is super easy to do.
Is it as easy as “create instance” or does it involve setting up a server and other cloud based software?
it is not that easy… you do need to understand the basics of the underlying systems (server/network/storage), and then be able to keep them up to date and running. and then there are the costs associated with it… i think with a stripped down lemmy you could get it runnin for maybe 10$/month.
That’s not too far off the mark, It cost me about $20 AU so probably $15 US. I could get cheaper if I wanted to host further from home (I’m happy with a AU host for my New Zealand instance)
If you don’t care about the technical stuff, have money to spend, and just want an instance you have complete over: services like this will take care of the difficult parts for you. All you need to do is point a domain at one of their servers. There are probably others as well; the point is, there are people you can pay to do all the hard parts for you, at the cost of some control and customisability.
Doing Lemmy hosting yourself, if you don’t already have a server already, involves the following:
If you know your way around Linux, setup should take 30 minutes, give or take some time for purchases and registration to come through. If you’ve never used Linux, I expect setup time to be one or two days, depending on how quick you pick up on it, filled with frustrated Googling about how to edit a text file through the command line and how to exit
vim.You’ll probably also want to set up a calendar reminder to check on your server every once in a while, just in case. Probably best to check for new/upcoming Lemmy releases every other week or so, and you’ll probably want to keep an eye on the disk space being eaten up by Lemmy over time as well. If you’re using a server OS, make sure to enable automatic updates to save yourself the effort of having to keep an eye out for security vulnerabilities; something like Debian’s
unattended-upgradesshould be sufficient for 99% of all software, especially if you schedule a weekly reboot.If you have some Linux administration knowledge (i.e. you’re a programmer), the brief steps are as follows: